If you have had a tough day at work or are struggling to get through the cold, gray, depressing state of affairs that is February, spare a thought for these cryptocurrency customers.

QuadrigaCX, a Canadian-based cryptocurrency exchange company, has had to confess it is unable to repay almost all of the $190 million ($250 million CAD) it owes clients following the sudden death of its 30-year-old CEO and co-founder, Gerald Cotton, in December last year.

Cotton, it has been reported, was the sole person in charge of the funds. Now, his widow Jennifer Robertson says the information required to access a large chunk of that digital goldmine is locked in limbo on his password-protected laptop.

According to court documents obtained by crypto news site CoinDesk, Robertson said Cotton left no business records, while attempts by a technical expert employed by the firm to bypass the computer's encryption and reach the capital being held in "cold storage" have so far failed.

"Quadriga's inventory of cryptocurrency has become unavailable and some of it may be lost," Robertson said.

Which means the 115,000 or so users with balances in cryptocurrency and/or fiat money on their account may be unable to collect the cash they are owed. It is not a particularly good start to February.

It is also not the first time QuadrigaCX has been in hot water, legally speaking. The company has been facing liquidity issues since January 2018, when the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce froze $26 million worth of assets following certain irregularities with payment processing.

The matter has been resolved but it has left “ongoing issues”, CoinDesk reports.

Now, Cotton's death is throwing up another set of problems. Robertson announced the news of her husband's passing on social media via the company’s Facebook page on January 14, writing.

"Gerry died due to complications with Crohn's disease on December 9, 2018 while traveling in India, where he was opening an orphanage to provide a home and safe refuge for children in need."

According to CoinDesk, the company is considering selling off its operating platform. In the meantime, it is due to appear in court in Nova Scotia, Canada, today (February, 5).

I love the case choice, I haven't seen a case with USB ports on the side before, IMO it's the next best thing since sliced bread. I wonder if inverse cases (if any to be made since Corsair's one) will ever be introduced with a similar feature. (I am actually quite surprised the inverse case idea never took off, you get to see the cool part of your GPU not the boring PCB side)

The full article on RockPaperShotgun is in the link, what do you guys think about that? Was it the state of Connecticut that supported a game dev and it backfired, I wonder if its gonna end up the same way

For those of you with NVIDIA RTX graphics cards, there is now another game that takes advantage of the GPU's RT Cores, it just might look a little old. Q2VKPT is a proof-of-concept project that has completely replaced the original graphics code of Quake II with a path tracing solution called VKPT. Rasterization is only used for rendering the UI, so everything else uses ray tracing and path tracing. Path tracing and ray tracing are different, as the FAQ at the first link explains, as ray tracing is a primitive operation that does not produce realistic images, while path tracing is the light transport algorithm here that does create the image.

To make this possible, a number of technologies are being used, including the RT cores of NVIDIA's Turing-based GPUs, which are being accessed with the VK_NV_ray_tracing extension. As you may have guessed by that extension name, this is using the Vulkan API instead of DirectX, and so can be run on Linux as well as Windows, provided you have an RTX graphics card. In addition to utilizing the RT cores, an adaptive temporal filter is also in place, which will track changes to the light transport path so previously computed information can be reused, instead of new computations being done. Many modern games use temporal filtering in a similar way, but look only to the image space instead of the high-dimensional space used here.

Even if you do not have an RTX graphics card, you may still want to check out the source links as this proof-of-concept could be demonstrating some of what we will see in the future of games. If you do have an RTX card though, you can also download and try he game out for yourself.